The Orchid Hunter

“Bring me back the Death Orchid and I’ll see your great-uncle has the best chance at living out his full span of years.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s everything it’s rumored to be.” He spread his hands as he said, “It’s the elixir of life.”

He was out of his mind. As nuts as Lawrence Daley and his nutty high-society employer. As nuts as any nutty botanist, taxonomist, or nursery owner who longed for glory in the insulated, isolated, nutty world of rare orchid collecting.

Before I could open my mouth, von Brutten said, “I have proof the orchid exists.”

He snapped his fingers. Sims glided in with a thick padded envelope, laid it on the table, bowed and vanished.

“Please.” Von Brutten’s long fingers gestured to the envelope. “See for yourself.”

I didn’t budge. “What about Cradion? What proof do you have of their wrongdoing?”

“Let me handle Cradion.”

Fair enough. My agenda was pretty narrow. “What will you do for my uncle?”

“I have controlling interest in Lexicran Pharmaceuticals, which directly competes with Cradion. I can…encourage…a particular kind of research.”

“You’re way behind. Cradion’s already in phase two trials. The drug’ll be on the market in no time.”

“My company has been developing a similar treatment for Parkinson’s.”

“Maybe so, but my great-uncle’s problems are a little bigger than that now.”

“A Parkinson’s cure is not the only endeavor my company pursues. Heart medications, like the one that may restore your guardian’s damaged tissues, are also of interest to us. The Death Orchid is the difference between our drug getting FDA approval in two years and Cradion killing off more old people.”

“You just want to see Cradion go down the tubes so your company won’t have any competition. You don’t care about its ethics. Or the Parkinson’s patients.”

Von Brutten’s silver eyes flashed with what might have been humor. “Of course I don’t. I care about the bottom line. So do you. You only want your guardian to survive. You don’t care about the patients who might die because Cradion can pull the wool over the FDA’s eyes.”

“That’s pretty harsh,” I began, but he kept going.

“Stop pretending we’re not the same, Dr. Robards. If you were perfectly honest with yourself, you might find you don’t even care that much about your great-uncle because you’re too busy hating Cradion.”

“Bullshit!” I reached for the doorknob.

He raised his voice. “I can take Cradion down with your help. And save the old man.”

The door handle’s coldness penetrated my palm. I was too much of a pragmatist to obsess over ethics or consequences, but I resented his assumption that my hatred of Cradion overshadowed my love for Scooter. Being successful had made von Brutten arrogant. And offensive. On the other hand, experience had taught me he was also a man of his word, twisted as it was.

He turned my pragmatism against me to get what he wanted: the Death Orchid. And he’d use my bottom line—Scooter’s life—to get it.

Damn.

I let go of the doorknob. “Show me,” I said.

“The Death Orchid is real. I’m told it contains the compounds necessary to create a lifesaving heart medication.”

“Terence Harrison published a paper that refuted claims the Death Orchid exists.”

He inclined his head. “He did so at my request.”

“You mean he lied?”

“I mean he massaged the data so we could continue our work with the plant unmolested by competitors. But that’s old news, Dr. Robards. My researcher ran out of specimens for testing and I need you to bring me another.” His lips quirked. “Or two.”

He opened the envelope and slid its contents onto the table as I walked over to see what he had. It wasn’t much. A blood-streaked, ripped-out page of a spiral notebook. A brass key.

I raised one eyebrow at him.

“Harrison’s last work,” he replied.

“Harrison’s been on sabbatical for a year.”

“I know. He was working for me.”

“What?” My brain struggled. “Harrison isn’t the kind of guy to give up his precious scientific detachment to squander his talents in a commercial effort.”

Von Brutten beamed a pitying look my direction. “If you only knew how many idealistic academics I have on my payroll. Harrison was your mentor, wasn’t he?”

I nodded. “Plant Biology, specializing in taxonomy and biochemistry. And he works for you now?”

“He did, yes.”

“Did?”

“May still do. I’m not sure.”

“Why not?”

“He’s missing.”

A chill shot through my gut. The mild-mannered and anal-retentive Dr. Harrison was physically no match for one of Scooter’s nursing home girlfriends, much less a hired thug. The shock subsided a little in time for anger to take over. Harrison was harmless. They didn’t have to get rough, whoever they were.

I turned the notebook page over, studying the brown stain’s irregular edges sprawled on top of scribbled black ink. The writing beneath was illegible, partly because of the blood and partly because of Harrison’s trademark chicken scratch and the torturous, self-invented shorthand he’d used. Shorthand I’d spent long hours deciphering, keying his lab observations into the best taxonomy and morphology database in the country.

My mind flashed on Harrison’s characteristic fastidiousness, his fondness for bow ties and cheap cologne, his weirdly pale green eyes. Dedicated to the cause. He wouldn’t work for von Brutten unless he had to, no matter what von Brutten had said. I’d sat through too many ad hoc lectures about ethics and the purity of intellectual scientific pursuit to believe otherwise.

But there was that day I’d come back to his office early from lunch and settled down in my cubicle to catch up on some tedious cataloging. Over the high wall that separated my desk from Harrison’s, I heard the door snick shut and him pace quickly to his desk. We worked in silence for a few minutes until I popped up from behind my cube to ask a question. His desk faced mine. Behind it, he stared intently at his computer screen, like a kid lost in a video game. When I spoke, his eyes snapped to mine and his face flushed. Caught. I couldn’t understand what he said to me then, he was stuttering so badly. It’d taken most of the day for his hands to stop shaking and his face to resume its normal pallor.

I’d never cared to know what he was looking at and I still didn’t. All I knew was that beneath the hard core scientist lurked something weak, maybe even shameful. But hell, we all had our weaknesses, our frailties. What had happened to make Harrison sell out his principles, to work for someone like von Brutten? To possibly get him killed? The anger took on an edge of sadness as I ran a finger over the stain’s edge.

“Harrison’s blood, perhaps,” von Brutten offered.

“And he’s missing.” I swallowed. “Or do you really mean dead?”

“Kidnapped is another option.”

Great. I was not Nancy Drew. “Right,” I said, “and he could have nicked himself with a penknife, thought, ‘to hell with it,’ and is now stretched out in a hammock in Belize. I can’t find him based on this information.”

Von Brutten pressed his silk hanky to his upper lip. “Dr. Harrison’s whereabouts don’t interest me, Dr. Robards. I want you to find another Death Orchid.”

“You want me to find a phantom orchid at the possible expense of my life, Mr. von Brutten. I know you play your cards close to the vest but I need you to flash me an ace here.” His mild eyes flickered when I looked at him hard and asked, “Is Harrison dead?”

“I honestly don’t know. He hasn’t reported in, and this is what was brought to me when I made inquiries.”

It wasn’t brain surgery to figure out the henchmen von Brutten had sent hadn’t found either Harrison or Harrison’s corpse. “Is this the best your goons could do?” I waved the page. “Where’s the rest? And what’s it from?”

“It’s from the project notebook he used during new lab tests. He was double-checking his initial results before heading into the field to obtain another Death Orchid. My associates didn’t find the notebook.”

So whoever did something, whatever it was, with Harrison probably had the bulk of the research. I struggled with the image of Harrison frumping around the forest, red bow tie and green cardigan, a trowel in one hand and bug spray in the other. As far as I knew, the closest he’d ever gotten to a jungle was a springtime stroll through Edgerton Park.

“Where is ‘the field’?” I demanded. “South America? Africa? The Pacific Rim?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s crap. If the Death Orchid was so important to you, you’d know where it could be found.”

“Dr. Harrison disappeared before he could convey that information to me. He was working in San Antonio.” Von Brutten picked up the brass key and dangled it from his elegant thumb and forefinger like a gift. Or bait. “His lab.”

“Will whoever jumped him be waiting for me when I get there?”

Von Brutten’s shoulders lifted a quarter of an inch, then dropped. A shrug, I interpreted.

“For a guy who knows everything, you don’t know much,” I informed him. “You know what happened to him, and you know whether I’ll be next if I use this key.”

The smile that briefly tipped up the corners of his lips chilled my blood. “You won’t be next. After all, I’m counting on you to bring back my orchid.”

His orchid. Right. Keep your priorities straight, girl. This ain’t ’bout nothin’ but the flower. Remembering that might keep me alive.

“You do know Thurston-Fitzhugh knows you’re after it,” I said.

Von Brutten’s sculpted eyebrows rose slightly. “A leak.” The brief flash of steel in his eyes said heads would roll within the hour. “There is a detail of which you should be aware,” he added.

I didn’t like it already. “What’s that?”

“My lab will require a week to produce the serum that will save your great-uncle.”

Fear clutched my stomach, choked my lungs. “And my great-uncle will last a month at the outside. So you’re telling me I have a little over two weeks to figure out what Harrison knew, get to wherever he was headed, find the orchid and then get back?”

Von Brutten shrugged. “Sixteen days, technically, if you leave today. And if the old man hangs on.”

Shit.

There was no way. Finding a plant you’d never seen took months, not days. But I had to try.

“You have copies of these things?” I asked as I shoved the evidence back in its envelope.

His smile suggested I was terribly naive. “Have a good trip, Dr. Robards. Keep me informed. I’ll have the lab on standby, awaiting your return.”

I leveled a look at him meant to tell him bad things would happen if he didn’t honor that promise. His own expression was mild, vaguely fatherly, the look of a man who had nothing to lose.

And because I had everything to lose, I grabbed the envelope and left.

Not one to walk into trouble blind, I decided to call in a couple of favors before heading to Harrison’s lab. In a previous life, I’d done a little contract work for the CIA, helping them with the Danube violet poison case. Nearly getting killed then would come in handy now: this particular science office owed me some serious favors. I planned to get the straight story on Cradion Pharmaceutical and my missing graduate advisor. If anybody could dig up the real dirt, it was these guys. After a short conversation with the Man In Charge about some pharmaceutical industry snooping, I took the elevator to the basement to find Marcus Donovan.

Marcus’s wizardry with all things clinical had broken the Danube case open wide and made him the leading expert on plant-based poisons. Before the CIA wags could start speculating on my joining their little hazplant team and before Marcus could start speculating on whether I’d move in with him, I’d bailed. As far as I was concerned, getting involved with anything for the long haul was bad news. This time I needed to keep things between me and Marcus professional.

I had to remind myself of that as I leaned in his lab’s doorway, watching him do his secret agent thing. Tall, he had to lean way over to look through his microscope, spilling locks of long, black hair over his forehead. His broad, white-coated shoulders made him look more like a sanitarium orderly than a scientist. His movements were large but precise. The impression I got was of a pro running back repairing an antique watch.

He must have sensed my presence because he said, “Not you again,” without looking up.

I waved the plastic envelope von Brutten had given me, Harrison’s bloodstained page safely sealed inside, and pushed off from the doorjamb.

The lab was stainless steel, glass, and bitterly cold. I wished I’d brought a sweater. Maybe it was why Marcus and his crew were confined to the CIA’s basement, leaving the innocuous, stucco-fronted HQ upstairs looking more like the San Antonio Visitors Bureau than the software company it purported to be.

“How’d you get in here?” He removed the slide from the microscope and filed it carefully in sequence on a tray.

“Everybody in this office owes me for the Danube incident.”

Marcus looked up finally, meeting my gaze. “I think I’ve already paid my dues.”

My face went hot. “You’re right,” I admitted.

“You could at least have left a note on my pillow.” His keen blue eyes sharpened. “A Dear John works better for me than a vanishing act.”

I nodded. I needed to apologize—for leaving without saying goodbye, for being scared, for hopping in the sack with him in the first place—but the words stuck somewhere around the base of my throat. Dear Marcus, I’m sorry I’m a selfish bitch. I’m sorry I left after one night and never looked back.

He nodded, apparently accepting the words I didn’t say. A deep breath later, he relaxed into his old teasing ways. I was forgiven. “What’d you do to your hair?”

I shrugged, felt the ponytail just brush my shoulder. “I needed a change.”

“You see the boss?”

“I did indeed. He wished me well.”

“He wished you to hell, you mean.”

“Yeah, but only after I’ve got what I came for. He’s checking into a pharmaceutical company for me.”

“A pharma?”

“It’s personal.”

He nodded, taking that in and leaving it alone. “I thought you’d moved far, far away,” Marcus said, rounding the gleaming worktable and smiling a little as he did it.

He was still a hunk, but I wasn’t here to resurrect ghosts. “I did. Now I’m back.”

“For how long?” He crossed one muscular arm over the other, prompting a nice burn of remembrance in my sweet spot.

“Long enough for you to tell me what this is.” I handed him the plastic envelope.

He took it, glanced at the page. “It’s a new excuse for not having your homework.”

“I’m serious.”

When Marcus smiled, that dimple quirked in his cheek.

“I’m really serious,” I said firmly, trying to ignore the dimple. “This is evidence and I need to read what’s under the blood.”

He exhaled loudly for my benefit. “All right.” He pulled the page out of its protective plastic to examine it. “I don’t see how you can read this scribble even if I can clean it up.” He frowned. “But it’s not blood. It’s something else.”

“What?”

“I’ll have to get back to you.”

“I’m short on time,” I said. “Can you at least make the writing visible?”

“Wait here.” He went through a side door that had a red bulb over the doorway, like a photography dark room.

While I waited, I took out Harrison’s brass key. Under the harsh lab lighting, the key looked crisp around the edges, like it’d been superimposed on my vision. I evaluated what I knew at this point. Harrison had set up a research lab in San Antonio and worked on some kind of miracle cure for von Brutten. Whoever had kidnapped or killed Harrison had probably already been to his lab since von Brutten’s henchmen had come up with nothing more useful than the stained page Marcus was working on. If the bad guys had taken Harrison’s project notebook, that meant they had some idea of what they were looking for. But as far as I knew, there weren’t that many assassin botanists running around, so I stood a chance of finding something the bad guys wouldn’t think important. Otherwise, I’d have to widen my search to Harrison’s house.

The dark room door opened and Marcus came back with what looked like a Photostat on clear film. It was.

“Here’s the page sans blood as best I can get it for now. If you want to know what the blood actually is, that’ll take a little time.” He leaned his hip against the lab table and smiled charmingly at me. “Can I call you?”

“Better leave me a voice mail,” I said, handing him my card. “I’m in a hurry.”

I froze, my hands in Harrison’s drawers.

Down the town house’s single flight of stairs, low voices burbled. Men’s voices. Two of them. Steps creaked as the men climbed up. Fortunately, I’d pushed the upstairs bedroom door nearly shut before starting my little rampage through my old mentor’s underwear.

My luck never runs good for long. They must be cops. Had someone seen me breaking and entering an expensive condo in broad daylight?

The men passed up the bedroom and went directly into the home office across the hall, like they knew where they were going. Shuffling, papers flipping, footsteps. They weren’t cops. Harrison’s latest graduate students, maybe? Did they work in his lab? Something glass shattered on a hard surface and one of the men cursed.

“Shut up!” the other hissed.

“Why? Nobody’s home.” A pause. “It stinks in here.”

“So?”

“It’s gross.”

“Keep your voice down. Leave that alone and help me look through these binders. It’s got to be here somewhere.”

I straightened. Funny how fear evaporates when I know the other guy is just as much in the wrong as I am. It kind of levels the moral playing field. Gives a girl back her spunk.

The Dr. Terence Jasper Harrison I knew was a Grade-A neatnik. A place for everything and everything in its place. His office could have been the poster child for anal, scientific academia. He didn’t go out looking for plants; plants came to him to be studied to death.

One look at Harrison’s lab on San Antonio’s north side an hour ago had told me he’d either gone off his meds or the bad guys had beaten me there. After scrounging around the broken glass, strewn papers and emptied specimen cabinets, I’d gotten out before the cops could show up and pin the damage on me.

Next stop: his downtown two-story condo, where I now knelt, up to my elbows in socks carefully bundled into color-coded piles, except for a mateless stray exiled to the bottom right corner.

The second-floor home office now being ransacked by the jokers had yielded nothing for me but a bunch of old notebooks, an array of dried specimens, a few bottles of herbs in preservative alcohol, and one very nasty dead mouse behind the bookcase. Dr. Harrison had been out for some time. Nothing even remotely resembling a clue had been left behind.

That was my advantage in having been his graduate assistant. I knew he may have kept his technical notes in his office, but he always kept a memento of his current big find close to home. Kind of like a souvenir. Or a security blanket. Or a good-luck charm.

Hence the sock drawer. Alas, nothing but socks. I took another look around.

Harrison’s full-size bed sported a manly plaid bedspread undimpled by hands or head. The plain oak nightstand was held down by two neat stacks of books, biology texts in one and true crimes in the other. The oak dresser sat forlornly against the near wall, its surface empty except for a lone comb, a homemade ashtray and a fine layer of dust.

I flipped silently through the books on the nightstand. Nothing. The nightstand didn’t have a drawer. The stray sock’s mate lay limp under the bed. I felt between the mattresses but came up with nothing. I picked up the heavy wooden ashtray, hoping for a key underneath. Nada.

I was about to put the ashtray back when its design caught my eye. The pattern under the varnish gleamed pearlescent black on matte black, almost like raku. Had they smoked the wood somehow to make it look like that? I looked closer. The ashtray was homemade all right, but not by Harrison’s niece in art class. The inside bottom bore a miniature stylized jaguar pawprint.

Last time I saw something like that was in an ethnobotany presentation on how particular plants and herbs had been used for hundreds of years by shamans. Into the bowl goes crushed leaves and monkey spit, out comes a medicine to cure earache. The bowl itself was blessed by the shaman. A blessed bowl imbued the plant matter ground in it with magical powers.

Harrison wasn’t the type of guy to keep knickknacks around, not even precious mementos from past projects. Hell, there was barely anything in the condo that didn’t look like standard hotel fare. And Harrison didn’t smoke.

The bowl’s presence suggested two things: First, Harrison really had been in the field to collect the Death Orchid and brought this little talisman back recently, as a souvenir. Second, if I could find out where the bowl came from, I could figure out where Harrison had found the orchid.

The bowl fit in my shoulder bag. Now to wait until the jokers left.

“We could get Noah to go after the orchid, you know,” one said to the other. It sounded like he was standing in the office doorway.

“I don’t want to pay him if I don’t have to.”

“Well, no, but why should we have to contract malaria when we can hire someone else to do it?”

Indeed. I’d often asked myself the same question. My answer was always that I knew my job better than anyone else. These clowns might be after the Death Orchid, but they were probably armchair botanists. Sort of like Harrison without the single-minded pursuit of taxonomic perfection. This Noah guy might be another collector for hire, like me or Lawrence Daley. Heck, these guys might even be locals working for Constance Thurston-Fitzhugh, trying to track down the Death Orchid for her.

As it was, Noah was a nice alias. Most of us used stage names to hide our identities from Fish and Wildlife and Customs. I’d already had six last names in the past three years, with passports to match. “Robards” was my favorite so far. I’d hate giving it up in a few months.

Then there was a crash and thunk, like they’d pulled the desk apart. Scrabbling. A creak. Nails being ripped from boards.

“Wait, I’ve got it!” the one inside the office said.

“This isn’t a map—”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

Silence for a long moment. Annoyance flared in my chest. It was unfair. So I’m not Nancy Drew. I got here first. I just don’t bust up the furniture to find the loot.

“What are all the numbers?” the whiner asked.

“He wrote everything in code. I’ll get one of his students to translate it. Let’s go.”

“So we don’t need Noah?” the whiner asked as they passed the bedroom on their way out.

“Not if this turns out to be a map.”

I waited until they closed the front door to slip downstairs after them. They headed off the condo’s grounds and further into town, toward the River Walk. I followed, playing native San Antonian out for an early evening stroll.

The one I assumed was the Whiner was a thin little guy about my height sporting a bad haircut and a limp. The other one, the Brain of the outfit, needed to take an iron to his Dockers and was losing his hair in back. He was kind of cute if a girl could ignore the haughty look he threw at her as he shrugged on his light windbreaker. Jerk.

They crossed the Crockett Street Bridge and dropped down to the River Walk below, where the trees, flowering shrubs and flowing green water lowered the temperature several degrees. I hadn’t been on the Paseo del Rio since the Danube case three years ago, but a glance at a walk map refreshed my memory. The restaurants and shops might have changed hands, but the river itself was still the same.

Fair enough. The dinner crowd was just picking up. Bumping into the Brain and the Whiner would be a cinch.